Let My People Go
by Lysana
Summary: Mini-sequel to the awesome Robin Williams movie "What Dreams May Come." If Chris could save Annie against the odds, what might happen if a rescue mission is mounted on a larger scale? The heroes: All the souls in Heaven. The quest: To rescue every soul in Hell. The stakes: Once they get to Hell, everyone from Heaven just might be trapped there too. Can they defeat Damnation itself?


For Kim, my friend and fellow Light Renegade,  
Whose love inspired the idea for this story.

And for Randy, the only Wookiee I ever want to kiss,  
Because if we ever find ourselves in Hell,  
We'll turn it into the biggest party this ol' cosmos has ever seen.

* * *

**When Israel was in Egypt's land, Let my people go!  
****Oppressed so hard they could not stand, Let my people go!  
****Go down, Moses, way down in Egypt's land,  
****Tell old Pharaoh, **_**Let my people go!**_

**-African-American slave spiritual**

* * *

It was Ian's idea, really. When Annie and I came back from our "second honeymoon" life, after the initial joyful greetings had slowed down, he took us aside with a very serious look on his face.

"I've been thinking, Dad," he said earnestly. "You brought Mom back from Hell when none of us thought it could be done. So if it could happen for one person, why not all of them? What are we all thinking, leaving anyone there?"

That's my boy. Never dances around an issue, but gets straight to the face-slamming point.

Annie's face lit up with a huge, radiant smile. "It's perfect, Ian! We can save them all!" Her painter's imagination was always quick to seize possibilities that way. It's just one of the thousands of reasons I feel so honored to be her soulmate.

As for me, I really didn't take any longer to know how I felt about it. _No one_ needed to be in a place like the place I'd found Annie in.

"Let's go!" I said. "But this is gonna take more than just us. Have you talked to anyone else?"

"Just Marie," Ian answered. "We wanted to run it past the experts first."

* * *

A thought and a wish later, the four of us were standing in the middle of the plaza in Shared Vision City. Marie hopped lightly up to the top of a thirty-foot-tall pillar and cupped her hands around her mouth. "Everyone," she called out in her sweet, clear voice. "May I have your attention?"

At once, all of the joyful souls set aside whatever they'd been doing and turned to look at her. "What is it, Marie?" an alert, curious voice called out from somewhere in the crowd.

Marie smiled. "Thank you all," she said. "My family and I have something very important to talk to everyone about. And we need your help. Because this is gonna be big."

She looked out across the crowd. "What's the one thing we've all learned, sooner or later, by being here?" she asked.

The answer came right away. "We can do _anything!_" a little boy piped up, floating on russet wings above one of the many rippling fountains. Nods and calls of agreement came from all around.

"Of course!" Marie said, her face joyful now. Switching angles, she said, "You all know my mom Annie, right?"

Shouts of "Sure we do!" and "You bet!" and "Hey Annie, how ya doing?" filled the plaza.

Marie nodded. "And I know you all remember how she got here. How my dad, the biggest hero I know, rescued her from the hell she'd created for herself out of her pain..."

I smacked myself in the forehead, then just kept my hand in front of my face as if I could hide there. _No, Marie, not the 'hero' stuff again..._ But if it worked, it worked, I thought ruefully. Shaking my head, I emerged from hiding and looked up at my lovely daughter again.

The feeling in the plaza had changed. There was a cautious sense now, as Marie edged toward territory that people weren't entirely comfortable with. But they were still willing to listen, and I felt a wave of gratitude for that. Beside me, Annie squeezed my hand as we saw that no one, not even one person turned away.

"Now I'm going to ask you to challenge the limits of _anything,_" Marie said, her gentle yet eagle-fierce eyes sweeping the plaza. "Because if Dad could save Mom, then we - all of us together - can save _everyone._ And the only question is, _are we going to?"_

There was total, absolute silence for a moment. Annie, Ian, and I on the ground, and Marie on her pillar, waited and felt as if the universe was holding its breath. _Maybe it is,_ I started to think, when the silence was broken.

"Yes!" The ringing shout echoed and shattered the waiting stillness. Somewhere in the arena, we saw a fist jabbed high into the air above someone's head.

There was another heartbeat of silence, then the plaza erupted with shouts and cries from every direction. "Yes! Yes! YES! Save them ALL!"

My heart caught in my throat as some of the cries became more personal.

"My mother!"

"My grandpa!"

"My son!"

"My husband!'

"Amy!"

"Sarah!"

"Jeff!"

You didn't need to be a shrink like my old mentor Albert to see it. This crowd was on fire.

* * *

It didn't even take as long to happen as it takes to tell it now. Marie got everyone's attention again, then turned the floor (or the pillar) over to me. I gave them all a quick rundown of what to expect.

"There's very real danger there," I warned them. "Now, we can handle it, but we need to be careful and stay focused on our mission. I suggest that everyone go in teams, two or more. That way you can support each other. But even outside our teams, we all need to be on the lookout for anyone who falters. Any one of us could need a helping hand to stay sane over there." I cracked an ironic grin. "This is Hell we're talking about, after all. But don't worry, we'll all be looking out for each other. Even if you feel yourself getting lost, just keep believing that there's help coming. Because there _will_ be. Right, people?"

"Right!" a thrumming chorus of voices shouted in reply.

I nodded firmly. "Then we can't lose. Now let's go, people! We go to storm the gates of Hell!"

When I touched down at the base of the pillar, there was a stunningly unique young lady standing and talking with the rest of my family. She looked to be in her late teens, but it could have been her early twenties, too. Skinny and athletic with a delicately feminine face framed by oversized ears, she radiated energy. Her bare arms and her ankles below her cutoff jeans were covered with beautiful, henna-patterned tattoos. Sprouting from her head was a wild abundance of bright red-and-purple-dyed hair. She wore a tank top shirt that said, in big, bold rainbow letters, **GAY LOVE IS STILL LOVE.**

"Hi," she said exuberantly, turning to me as I landed. "Call me Lib. It's short for Liberty, but I prefer to keep it simple." She offered her hand.

I took it, impressed with her firm, self-confident handshake. "It's a pleasure to meet you, Lib," I said. "Would you like to team up with me and my family?"

"That's just what I had in mind," she said. "Off we go, right?"

"Right!" Annie answered boldly. And with that, we and the whole crowd were suddenly standing at the portal to Hell.

* * *

I guess finding one's own perfect paradise can tend to spoil a person. Hell looked even more scary and mournful than I remembered. The dark water, the cries of pain and loneliness, the fires and the violent clash of weapons, as people kept on, trapped in their old patterns of hurting themselves and each other... My commitment didn't waver, but it was like being hit in the face with a blast of hot wind that almost knocks you off your feet. I clutched Annie's hand for support.

"Be brave, people!" my phenomenal wife called out, her voice carrying across the desolate landscape. "I got out of here. So will all of us and everyone else!"

"You're my kind of woman," Lib said approvingly, clapping Annie on the shoulder. Then she turned to me with a wry grin. "No adultery intended."

I grinned back at the lesbian teen. "Of course not. You wouldn't dare," I said lightly. But really, I didn't have any doubts about Lib's honorable intentions. There was something about her that made me trust her implicitly. She was just so... pure.

"All right, spread out!" Ian called to everyone. "This is going to be a snowballing process. Everyone go find someone to rescue. As we get more people free, there will be more of us to free the ones who are left. Let's make short work of this! We can do it!"

"Yes!" someone shouted in the middle distance. As if that cry of confidence was a signal gun, everyone scattered to the four winds. Or however many winds there were in Hell. Lib, my family and I plunged right in with them.

* * *

The sea of faces was an obvious starting place for us and a lot of the other rescuers. Suicides, self-blamers, people so conditioned by their religion to expect hell that they couldn't manifest any other reality for themselves because it never occurred to them that they'd have the right. Way too many of them were trapped here by their own imagined limitations and supposed shortcomings. Way too many, as in, _anyone._

My group and I knelt down around the mud-caked face of a sweet little old lady. "Hi," I said gently. "Who are you?"

"What's that?" she whispered. "Someone here? I'm sorry, I can't get to the door. And I don't know where the key is so you could let yourself in."

Just as I remembered with Annie, we all fell through the surface of the sea and into the old lady's world.

* * *

"Here it is," Lib said, reaching into the old-fashioned mailbox that hung by the lady's door and pulling out a worn bronze key. "Let's go in." She quietly turned the key in the lock and opened the door.

Inside, the house was a mess. There were dishes piled in the sink and all over the kitchen counter, dirty laundry everywhere, old newspapers stacked in a chair with some of them scattered where they'd toppled to the floor. This was clearly the home of someone who could no longer take care of herself, and had no one who cared enough to do it for her.

"Hello?" Marie called.

"I'm in the bedroom," the old lady's faint, tired voice answered. "It's a terrible mess. I'm so sorry, dears."

Ian and I exchanged an angry glance. There was something very wrong about a system that had taught this lady to be _sorry_ for being neglected like this.

We all found our way to the bedroom, stepping over bags of trash that hadn't been taken out in who knew how long. Annie knocked softly at the door. "May we come in?"

"It's open," the old lady's voice answered. "But I never get visitors. It's really a terrible mess."

"Never mind that," Lib said firmly as we all walked into the bedroom. "Will you tell us your name?"

"Julie," the old lady breathed.

It was a wrenching sight as we came face to face with her. Julie was lying in a twin bed against the wall, her thin old body tangled in a dirty blanket that had snarled itself around her and left her lower legs bare. The room had a nasty smell that I remembered from the time I'd had to fire a CNA who didn't change her patients' briefs when they needed it. Old teacups cluttered the little bedside table. Dirty laundry was everywhere, and an overflowing little saucepan sat under a persistent drip in one corner of the ceiling.

Marie ran over and took Julie's hand. "Hi," she said. "I'm Marie. What happened here? Why is no one taking care of you?"

Julie weakly patted Marie's hand, then lay back shaking from the effort. "I don't have anyone," she said faintly. "My kids moved out of state, and since my husband died, it's just been me. I'm so sorry about the mess, dear. I keep meaning to clean it up but these old hips of mine..."

"Don't worry about the mess," Marie said firmly. "Tell me about yourself. How long have you lived here?"

"All my life," Julie said. "I was born in this house. But I won't live much longer." Her voice caught in a sob. "And I'm scared. Because I know I'm going to Hell."

Annie and I exchanged a stricken glance. Of course. This was why Julie had come here. I stepped forward and knelt beside her bed.

"Julie," I asked in my very gentlest bedside manner. "Why do you believe you're going to Hell?"

"Because I stopped going to church!" Julie cried out in an agony of guilt and fear. "After my husband died, there was no one to drive me. I called and begged the pastor to send someone for me, but he always said everyone was too busy and that maybe I could find another church closer to home that I could get to. But I can't drive, and I can barely get around inside my own house! So I know I'm going to Hell now when I die. Because my pastor always said that if you don't go to church, you'll go to Hell." Julie started crying softly. "And if I go to Hell, I'll never see Bruce again, because he always went to church and he's in Heaven!" Her words were barely understandable now through her tears.

Lib's eyes flared to life with a blazing, incandescent fire of wrath. "That is not how it works!" she exclaimed, low and passionate. Sprinting across the little room and dropping to her knees, she gently caressed Julie's forehead with a henna-swirled hand. "Your pastor was wrong. He was just speaking his own fear, Julie. You're not doomed to Hell, and neither is anyone. God's love is too big to let that happen. Don't you believe that?"

Julie's eyes widened. "I want to," she breathed. "I always thought He loved us like we were His kids. Because we are, aren't we? But the pastor said -"

Gently but firmly, Lib interrupted her. "What do you believe more? The words of a frightened pastor, or your own knowledge of what Love is?"

Fear and love fought a pitched battle on Julie's wrinkled face for a long moment. Then, finally, we all saw the magic when Love beautifully won. "I believe Love!" Julie said, then started crying too hard to speak. Lib hugged her, then took her by the hands and slowly helped her to stand up.

Julie tottered, steadied, and looked down at herself with an expression of wonder. Her sobs of joy and relief gradually ran their course. "My hips don't hurt anymore!" she exclaimed. "I never thought I'd feel this strong again!"

"You will forever now," Lib promised her.

I stood up, startled, as I heard the front door of the house slamming open back in the living room behind me. There was a sound of running feet. Then a fat old man came racing in the door and barely missed knocking us all over.

"Julie!" he bellowed. "They told me I could never see you again, I'm sorry, but then we all came here and I looked and looked and looked and then I felt that I had to come this way and here you are!"

With a little scream of joy, Julie fell into her husband's arms. "Bruce! But you're dead! Then how are you here?"

"We're both dead, honey-muffin," he told her. "I went to heaven, not because I was good enough, we all are, but because I expected to! And I guess you made this hell or whatever for yourself because you thought that's where you were going. But we're busting out of here, Julie! We're retirin' to a tropical island like we always wanted to, only forever!"

"Bruce is right," Lib said gravely. "You made your own Hell out of your fears and the unfair guilt you'd been handed all your life. Now you're ready for Heaven."

Julie looked at her. "But if I made myself a Hell, how about other people? Is anyone else stuck like I was?"

Lib's face glowed with joyful appreciation of Julie's question. "Yes, but not for much longer. Actually, I'm glad you asked..."

* * *

As Ian had predicted, the mass rescue mission was starting to snowball by the time we got back up to the sea of faces. It was looking more like a scattering of puddles of faces by this point, with rainbows and flowers sprouting in the new spaces between them. I started to realize that this was a bigger thing than I'd expected to set in motion. Rather than just rescuing souls from Hell, the joy and love and truth we were all spreading was turning Hell itself into a new neighborhood of Heaven.

Nearby, I saw the old man who'd mistaken me for his son when I'd been searching for Annie. He was free of his clinging mud now, standing in a patch of four-leaf clovers and sharing a bear-hug with a strapping young man in a barber's coat. "Claus! You really came!"

"I came, Dad. Now let's go find Kirti!"

All around us there were dozens of scenes like that going on. The rescuers now vastly outnumbered those still needing to be saved. The impossible was almost completed.

"Let's go, Bluebird!" Hand in hand with Bruce, Julie dashed off on her newly strong legs to go and help some of the few remaining trapped souls. Shrugging and smiling at the inexplicable pet name, I watched them go.

Then I turned to Ian and grabbed him up in a big hug. "I'm proud of you, son!" I told him warmly. "Didn't I tell you there was only one man I'd want to go through Hell with? We're going to call this a success."

"I'm proud of you too, Ian," Lib said. "You've broken through all the lies people have told about me and everyone else, and really turned this place around."

Pulling back from our hug, Ian gave her a blank look. "Lies? As in, homophobia?"

"Not exactly," Lib said gravely, "though it's all part of the same problem." She looked thoughtful. "I think it's time to introduce myself."

"Wait a minute," I said, catching on. "You're someone we already know, right?"

"You could say so," Lib agreed. "This is what I looked like in the lifetime you probably know me from."

Lib shimmered and changed. Standing in her place was a short, stocky guy with hard muscles and very dark olive skin. He was wearing off-white trousers and a loose shirt that looked homemade and had been mended a lot, and there was a big grin on his face.

Annie, Marie, Ian, and I all looked at each other. Then, puzzled, we turned back to Lib. "I'm sorry," I said slowly, "I don't remember ever meeting you."

"My dad was a woodworker," Lib said. "I followed him in the family trade for a while, but eventually I ended up as more of a traveling storyteller."

I shook my head. "Still doesn't ring a bell. Sorry."

"See, no one ever recognizes me this way," Lib said, resigned and maybe a little amused. "Try this one. A lot of people have painted me like this, though of course it looks nothing like me."

Lib changed again. I found myself looking at a figure I'd seen in countless paintings, illustrations, stained glass windows, and coloring books: a tall, serene-looking white guy with long brown hair, expensive old-fashioned white robes, and holes in his hands.

"Lord Jesus!" I fell to my knees, utterly shocked. Around me, I heard and saw my family doing the same thing.

"Oh, come off it," Jesus said, sounding for all the world like Lib. "We're all equals. That's the whole point of everything I ever said. So no bowing, okay?" He reached out and took my hand, pulling me to my feet. The rest of us got up, too. My family and I may not be terribly religious, but when Jesus says don't bow, you don't bow.

"One question," Annie said, the first of us to find her boldness. "You said people told lies about you and 'everyone else.' Who did you mean by that?"

"All the other teachers," Jesus said simply. "Putting it about that I was the only one who ever said anything worth saying is one of the biggest lies. Anyway, just take a look around. You see that kid in the Dungeons & Dragons T-shirt?" He pointed out a tall, lanky young man around college age who was taking a trapped soul by the hand and lifting him free of his broken traps. "That's the Buddha." Jesus smiled. "We're all here. You just have to look."

"Really? That's Buddha?" Marie asked, excited. "I gotta talk to him! Maybe he'll give me some tips on how to meditate!"

"I'm sure he will!" Jesus said, laughing aloud. "Really, you might find more familiar faces here than you think." He started pointing people out all across the brightening area that had recently been Hell. "The farmer in the overalls is Mother Teresa. The Aborigine in the full ceremonial gear is Gandhi. That old guy with the long white hair and the electric rock guitar on his back? That's Confucius."

"Wow," I said, taking it all in. I felt something stirring, a quiet hint, and turned to the side. "What about those little girls?" I asked, pointing at a pair of eight-year-olds with pigtails and matching checkered dresses, one blue, one pink.

"That's Moses and Moses," Jesus said, his voice warm with special appreciation. Seeing our confusion, he added, "Or to be more clear, Moses and Harriet Tubman."

"That's right," Ian said. "I remember that from school. She was called Moses because she brought so many people to freedom!"

"She sure did, risking her own life and freedom every time," Jesus said. He changed again, back to his short, dark-skinned form. "I think I'll stay like this for a while," he said. "This face doesn't get enough publicity."

I laughed. "That's one way to put it!" Then I got serious as a sobering thought struck me. "Now I need to ask you something. If you and all these other big-name types have been around all this time, knowing about this place," I waved my hand to indicate the disappearing vestiges of Hell, "then why didn't you do something about it before now? Why wait for us to figure it out? How could you leave all these souls to suffer all this time? How is that love?"

"There's no such thing as time," Jesus answered. "Their experience was the same no matter how the end of it came about. And don't you think it's better for the souls on both sides to heal their own division, instead of having it arbitrarily 'fixed' for you?"

"He's right," Annie said. "That's exactly how it was for me. I can't say if I was in Hell for just a moment or an eternity. It just _was._" She smiled and quickly kissed my face. "And it means a million worlds to me that it was _you_ who came to save me."

I thought about that, putting an arm around Annie's shoulder and holding her close. It was all true.

"You know," I said, giving Jesus a thoughtful look, "I have a feeling we're all going to find out the place we knew as Heaven had nothing on how this whole fixed-up eternity is going to be now."

Jesus grinned so hard he almost looked like the Cheshire cat. "Now you're getting it."

-The Beginning-

* * *

Author's Note: This story is a one-shot. I have no plans to continue it; I've already said what I wanted to say here. I hope you enjoyed it! Please leave me a review and tell me what you thought, and how soon you caught Lib at being who I meant her to be!

The cover art picture is one I did this morning in Windows Paint. The picture's title is "Hell in Bloom." You can see it full size on my DeviantArt page, where you can find me by the name of Lysana2124.

In case this needs to be said, I have the highest respect for all the religious and historical figures who appear or are mentioned in this story.


End file.
